Fiverr has now joined the most highly funded companies in the work intermediation platform (WIP) space. The freelance marketplace platform, founded in 2010, announced a $60 million financing round Wednesday led by Square Peg Capital, along with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel and Qumra Capital. This is the sixth round of financing in five years, bringing the total private equity funding to a stunning sum of $110 million.

The company began as an Israel-based startup, and it now has major offices in the U.S.A. It has often been incorrectly regarded as a not-so-serious player in the fast expanding freelance marketplace sector. Certainly this funding round is going to turn some heads and open some eyes to examine what Fiverr has really been about.

We have been in a position to follow Fiverr over the past few years. In this article, we provide a quick summary of the funding event and recent Fiverr developments discussed in the announcement. We will follow up next week with a more in-depth analysis of Fiverr and its perhaps surprising significance for services procurement.

In a Nutshell

Because of its low-end pricing restrictions on what sellers could charge buyers for their online deliverables, Fiverr came to be mistakenly thought as a down-market player, what we might call a kind of dollar store for online freelancer tasks. Contradicting that perception, Fiverr says it is shaping the future of work by shifting the freelance economy online.

In the press release, Fiverr describes itself as the worlds most transacted marketplace for digital services, saying “Our horizontal marketplace provides nearly any digital service in just one click.” Its buyers can choose from the worlds largest catalog of pre-packaged services ranging from graphic design to music/video editing to marketing and copy-writing. Fiverr also states that Fiverr sellers looking to make extra cash have delivered millions of high-quality Gigs from 100+ categories of services, and across 196 countries. Elsewhere, the company states that it generates close to 1 million digital transactions per month.

The recent announcement focused on the new investment round, and it also brought visibility to the formal launch of what has been an observable, gradually emerging strategy of moving up-market and supporting/encouraging productized service offerings/packages.

The press release explains that, for the first time, all freelancers on Fiverr will soon be able to set their own prices rather than be required to start them at $5.

Over the next several weeks, Fiverr also will be introducing easy-to-understand Gig Packages across several pricing tiers, which will simplify the way freelancers or Fiverr sellers price and bundle services, it said in the press release. The new Gig Packages will also help Fiverr sellers pocket more cash, create greater value for buyers, and make sellers nimble enough to compete for larger projects from SMBs, entrepreneurs and even corporate marketing departments. Fiverr will continue to roll out the bundled Gig Packages and other new value-added services and during 2016.

Cracking the Nut

Its clear from the announcement that Fiverr is now taking the wraps off of its longer-range strategy, which when you step back and look at it, starts to seem very much like a classical Clayton Christensen disruption play: entering at the low end of the market, establishing an innovative model and moving upward.

Coming out swinging, Fiverrs CEO, Micha Kaufman, said “This funding from new and existing partners will help expand our geographic footprint, compete for new talent, add innovative new features and more aggressively grow our company, potentially by acquiring other businesses in our space.”

And in case there is any doubt about a long-term vision and strategy at work over the past years at Fiverr, it’s interesting to go back to 2012, when Kaufman told TechCrunch, ‘Our vision is to turn Fiverr into the eBay for the service economy.’ Kaufman wasn’t pulling any punches back then, and now we can see that investors are not only attracted by the usual elements of a talented team and ability to execute but also by what appears to be clear vision and compelling strategy.

In other words, despite appearances, Fiverr is not a black swan.

Perhaps, surprisingly to some, Fiverr is now coming into focus as a significant, innovative player in the freelancer WIP space. In this context, we will be returning with a research brief providing a more extensive analysis of not only the Fiverr strategy but, perhaps more importantly, how what Fiverr is doing is directly relevant to services procurement.

]]>http://www.sequensant.com/hello-world/feed/0What kind of people actually make a living as freelancers?http://www.sequensant.com/amazing-post-with-all-the-goodies/
http://www.sequensant.com/amazing-post-with-all-the-goodies/#respondSat, 23 Mar 2013 17:20:09 +0000http://themenectar.com/demo/salient/?p=110By Justine Hofherr @Jhofherr29 Boston.com Staff | 10.22.15 | 11:13 AM With freelancers making up roughly 34 percent of the U.S. labor force, you might be wondering just who these...

With freelancers making up roughly 34 percent of the U.S. labor force, you might be wondering just who these people are, what kinds of jobs they have, how many projects they work on at once, and how good they are at their gigs. Thanks to a new report from LinkedIn, a little more light has been shed on the life of the average professional freelancer, or at least the ones who use the business-oriented social network.

LinkedIn analyst Lucy Chen dove into the freelance economy by looking for LinkedIn members who used the word ‘freelance’ in their job title, then aggregated the most common industries and skill sets found. While industries ranged from media and communication, to business consulting, engineering, and education, those in the arts and design field vastly outweighed other fields at 46 percent of LinkedIn freelancers. But if you were solely imagining these freelancers working in fine arts or graphic design, you’d be wrong, though most freelancers in arts and design are photographers and graphic designers. Graphic designers made up 20 percent of the field, and photographers comprised another 19 percent, but there were also illustrators, web designers, makeup artists, and musicians.

Chen figured out roughly how many gigs freelancers were juggling at once by finding members with more than one current role listed on their LinkedIn profile without an end date. On average, she found that most freelancers work on about two gigs at once, though Chen did not determine how many of these people were working full-time jobs concurrently, or working entirely on multiple freelance gigs“ but there were clearly both types of freelancers.

Chen also discovered that in general, more women on LinkedIn freelance than men. Men make up a larger percentage of LinkedIn users, but women make up more of the social network’s freelance labor force, she writes.

Just how good are freelancers at their jobs? If you judge them by their LinkedIn profiles, they’re pretty darn skilled. Chen reported that when comparing freelancers to non-freelancers with the same job title, freelancers on average had more recommendations, skills listed, endorsements, group memberships, and connections than their counterparts.

However, it’s worth noting that the preponderance of freelancers with profiles might have more to do with the nature of their job than the quality of their work. If you’re trying to land gigs based on your name alone, you’ll probably have to put more of yourself out there on networks like LinkedIn since you don’t have the reputation of a company to rely on.

If you’re on the fence about whether you want to leave your stable job to freelance (or even just freelance on the side), you might be interested to find that a recent survey by independent research firm Edelman Berland, and commissioned by Upwork, a freelance talent marketplace, and the Freelancers Union, a nonprofit freelancer advocacy group, reported that 60 percent of freelancers who left traditional employment and have been freelancing for at least the past year now earn more than they did as a traditional employee.

And if higher pay doesn’ t make you optimistic about freelancing, workers interviewed in the survey also reported freedom and a flexible lifestyle as the best benefits of the job.

Justine Hofherr can be reached at justine.hofherr@globe.com. Follow her @Jhofherr29

]]>The global contingent workforce management space is necessarily evolving as the supply and demand solutions are changing to address the fluid nature of the marketplace.
This can complicate or streamline the process. Obviously the streamlining solution is the goal for every organization.
One solution is the creation of so called ‘Global PEO’ . This is a misnomer, however, in that the ‘co-employer’ relationship is only recognized in the U.S. A more accurate description is Global Employment Outsourcing, a term coined by Safeguard World International. To GEO an employee is to engage Safeguard’s Global Employment Outsourcing and engage that employee legally and compliantly with Safeguard as employer of record in more than 125 countries.

Regardless, the worker is a contingent workforce employee placed in a country where the employer may not have a legal presence but has a need to employ workers.www.seqhcm.com